Iraqi Shiite forces say Kocho village to be handed over to Yazidis

Iraqi Shiite forces say Kocho village to be handed over to Yazidis

Posted on May 28, 2017

SINJAR, Northwest Iraq,— The deputy head of the Iraqi Shiite forces of Hashd al-Shaabi has declared that they have handed over the liberated Yazidi village of Kocho to the Yazidis, a village that has become the face of the Yazidi genocide by Islamic State group IS [Daesh]. He vowed that they will stay in the area to prevent potential attacks on the people in the future.

The villages taken by the Popular Mobilisation paramilitary force include Kocho (Kojo), where Islamic State fighters abducted hundreds of Yazidi women in 2014, including Nadia Murad and Lamiya Aji Bashar, recipients of the European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought.

Kocho and the other villages of the Sinjar mountain region will be returned to the Yazidi community, a Popular Mobilisation leader, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, told Iraqi state television.

Al-Muhandis, the Hashd commander, and the commander of the Mosul offensive Abdulamir Rashid Yarallah visited the village, south of the Yazidi town of Sinjar (Shingal) on Saturday, the Hashd media reported.

“We feel happy and sad of the liberation of this village that faced the murder of its entire people at the hands of IS,” Muhandis said in Kocho.

“The Hashd was able to liberate the village with the support of Yazidi fighters,” Muhandis added, calling the village “the symbol of the Yazidi tragedy.”

He continued to say that the Hashd forces will stay in the village to provide support to the Yazidi fighters in Kocho.

“The Hashd will provide them with protection whenever they need it to prevent the repetition of the tragedy,” Muhandis vowed.

Some Yazidi fighters who were earlier among the ranks of the Kurdish Peshmerga defected and joined the Hashd offensive that it launched earlier this month to drive out IS from areas close to the Syrian border.

Kocho, the hometown of the UN Goodwill Ambassador Nadia Murad, is a symbol of IS atrocities against Yazidi people. It is 18 kilometers south of Shingal town. Some 4,000 Yazidis used to inhabit it.

When IS militants attacked Sinjar and its surroundings in August 2014, they arrested thousands of Yazidis, many from the village of Kocho. Some of them were collectively killed in the village, other girls and women were sold or taken by IS members. The fates of thousands of Yazidis still remain unclear.

State-backed Shiite Hashd al-Shaabi paramilitary launched a fresh military campaign named “Shingal Martyr’s” that retook a number villages in the Shingal region on Thursday including the Yazidi’s Kocho, the symbol of IS atrocities.

The operation aims to control western Nineveh contested areas like Baaj and eventually reach Syria’s border,

It’s the second phase of the wide-scale operation of “Muhammed Rasululla” to retake remaining areas from IS militants in the Shingal region.

On August 3, 2014, Islamic State group has captured most parts of Sinjar district, a home to around 400,000 Yazidis, after Iraqi Kurdish KDP Peshmerga forces withdrew from Sinjar without a fight, leaving behind the Yazidi civilians, which led thousands of Kurdish families to flee to Mount Sinjar, where they were trapped in it and suffered from significant lack of water and food, killing and abduction of thousands of Yazidis as well as rape and captivity of thousands of women.

IS has killed more than 5,500 Yazidis since then.

According to Iraqi officials a total number of 7,000 Yazidi women, children and girls were abducted. The women are forced into sex slavery and are subjected to systematic rape. Even underage girls at the age of nine are not spared from sexual assault by the Islamic jihadists.

At least 3,000 Yazidi women are still being held.

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